One common problem seen on xerographic marking engines is the inability to consistently or uniformly print small, isolated dots, for example, in binary bitmaps of an image. This causes image quality defects such as missing highlight tone and dotted lines. To deal with marking engines of different characteristics and to achieve the desired growth behavior in general, finer control of density adjustment is needed that can avoid inconsistent outputting of a single isolated dot in an output image. Using error diffusion, which is a popular rendering method in copy path, or using optimizing halftone design as well as other frequency modulated screening techniques such as stochastic screen, single dots may be avoided to some extent. However, inconsistent and non-uniform isolated small dots are still hard to avoid resulting in artifacts in an output image.